In all forms of computerized systems, including forms such as desktop computers, tablets, e-books and smartphones, the cut-and paste and copy-and-paste functionality has become ubiquitous for applications that support text editing. The ease of copying and pasting, however, has lead to excessive copying of copyrighted and pre-existing electronic text, often without citation. As a result, plagiarism has become a major problem, in particular, within the educational system.
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines plagiarism as:                “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (another's production) without crediting the source; and to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.”        
Students regularly access reference text, in particular, on the Internet or elsewhere, and copy and paste it into their own documents. This is useful for recording reference material in one location. However, while the intent is for students to later paraphrase this material within the final document that they are writing, such as an essay, it is often the case that they simply retain much or all of the copied text. Certainly, wrapping the text within quotations and citing the source addresses one aspect of plagiarism. However, a common situation is that no citation is made and the copied text is presented as the writer's own. The ease of copy and paste is one of the culprits; another is that the student may feel that the copied text is the same as what they might have written or that it could not be written in any other way. Ultimately, schools are responsible for teaching students how to write without plagiarizing. The associated teaching practices are considered by some as arduous to implement.
Nevertheless, there are a number of technical solutions that can reduce plagiarism. Plagiarism related efforts have been primarily directed to detection. Measuring the similarity of a document with a pre-existing document is the most common method of detecting possible plagiarism. In this case, a document is compared to one or more source documents. If it is deemed similar to some source document(s) above a certain threshold, a human reader should be alerted for further investigation via manual inspection. For example, to put the notion of threshold in context, if 20% of a text is considered similar to one or more pre-existing texts, then for a document with 100 pages of content, 20 pages of it are considered “similar.”
Another area related to plagiarism in reading digital content, and relevant to the current invention, is the management of the clipboard or the copy-and-paste operation. Typical modern operating systems build in a clipboard management system that allows one to transfer content from one piece of software to another via the cut- or copy-and-paste operation (typically on Microsoft® Windows systems, Ctrl-X for cut, Ctrl-C for copy, then Ctrl-V for paste) with the use of an OS-allocated intermediary memory (“clipboard”) where the selected content is placed prior to the actual paste operation.
At one extreme, the capability to copy any text may be prevented altogether within the source application that displays the text. This is most common in e-book computer applications. Some websites attempt to prevent copying anything from their displayed pages. However, this does not prevent the user from manually retyping text.
Alternatively, the copy-and-paste operation may be monitored in a two-step process. A method can be designed to monitor the copy-and-paste operation triggered by a user. The second step depends on the monitoring system to manage the clipboard content. In some approaches, the paste operation has been extended to allow the content in the clipboard to be cleared, allowing one to control what can be placed on or removed from the clipboard. In contrast, other approaches focus on monitoring the content that a user has selected when a cut-and-paste operation is initiated. The system triggers an alert for a human administrator to monitor and manage the selected content for its sensitivity.
Despite the existence of the above kinds of technology, there is a need for some other technology to reduce plagiarism that is both preventative (without being excessive in terms of total blockage of copying) and not “after-the-fact.” This is especially needed in the case of supporting literacy development for both emergent writers and writers with advanced skills, where access to a limited amount of text is helpful, without the need for re-typing.
For any writer who intends to reuse content from an existing source text, unless it is a case of direct quotation, it is typically the key ideas, or specialized terminology, and not how they are expressed in the source text that are intended to be reused. The writer should carefully consider the key concepts from a source text useful in their writing instead of blindly copying (or retyping) mass amounts of content for later use (and possible re-tailoring, if at all). It is recognized that while allowing copying of some limited amount of text does not eliminate plagiarism, as citation is still required, it can reduce the aspect of plagiarism involving excessive copying.